Part 11 (1/2)

He was occupied by labour, they have an excess of leisure.

Christ was virginal; they are like maudlyns.'

He stopped. 'I won't go on nor, I think, should you.'

I felt my fists clench, and my vision starred. 'You're parroting my lines, as if their faults chirp for themselves. I thought you approved of taking the clergy to task.'

Chaucer squinted down at the quire, wetting a quill. 'Perhaps if you lightened up a bit, added a dash of humour to your biting satire?' He dipped, blotted, scratched. 'We've talked about this before. In your poetry, everyone is either good or bad. There's no room for moral ambivalence, no accounting for the complexity of character that renders us the fallen humans we are. It's as if you are firing arrows blindly at the entire world.'

'Are you saying the lines aren't true to their subject?'

He sighed, then turned to me. 'Much worse, John. They are not true to you.' I blinked. He leaned forward, his hand clutching his crowded desk. 'You're a dazzling Latinist, John, and your elegiacs could be taught as paradigms of the form. But why can't you take some risks in your work? Your verses always preach the upright line while you spend your own life scurrying through the shadows, ratting up useful bits of information you turn to your own advantage. Do you write this way because you see yourself as some white-clad incorruptible, standing on a high place upheld by excellent moral foundations? I hardly think so. Do you pen lines like these to obfuscate, to keep us all looking away from what you do? Because no one who writes like this could be as devious as John Gower, mon ami. Whatever your reason, your making doesn't come from your heart, from that place that makes you you. It doesn't ring true. It never has.'

I could say nothing. He looked at me for a long moment, a mix of puzzlement and affection in his eyes and, as I think back on it now, a shadow of pity. 'You are a stubborn man, John, and the stubbornest poet I know.' He nudged me back my booklet and turned to his desk, straightening a small corner of the untidy surface. 'Keep writing like this and you're bound for oblivion.'

Though his responses to my poetic making could often be harsh, Chaucer had never spoken to me like this. I sat there, goaded into silence by this cold a.s.sessment of my work, feeling something between long regret and immediate fury. Then one of Chaucer's clerks put his head in the door, asking several questions about the transaction down at the quay.

When he was gone I plunged straight in, my voice tight with anger. 'The book you're looking for is a work of prophecy. You didn't think to tell me this?'

'Prophecy,' said Chaucer, his bright eyes unreadable. 'What sort of prophecy?'

'Braybrooke claims the book is treasonous.'

He bent his neck and looked at the rafters. '”Treason” is a word tossed around like pigs.h.i.+t these days. Though considering the source I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. For the Bishop of London, thought itself is treason. Pose a few curious questions about the sacrament, get a hanging for your trouble.'

'Don't cling to Wycliffe, Geoffrey,' I warned him. 'Gaunt adored the man for some reason, but he was a heretic, and a dissident. His teachings have been roundly condemned.'

'G.o.d help us. And now Braybrooke is convinced this book is heretical? From everything I have heard it's just a light satire. A well-crafted look into England's royal past, with a peculiar twist here and there.'

I shook my head. 'Believe me, Geoffrey, this is not a book you want to be a.s.sociated with. There's already been loads of trouble about it: at court, at the inns, with the bishops foul circ.u.mstances that surround it on every side. Even a young woman's death.'

'What?'

'Murder, Geoffrey.' I told him what Swynford and Strode had told me, and reminded him of the disrupted pageant at the Temple Hall. I said nothing about the business with Symkok, keeping that bit of information to myself.

His hand went to his mouth. It trembled there, then went back to his side. 'Who was the young woman?'

'An agent of the French crown, by all appearances.' He was still. 'So you see, it's not Katherine Swynford who is responsible for the disappearance of the book. This is much bigger than her.'

He stared at me. Were those tears welling in the corners of his eyes? 'But why, John? Why would anyone kill a young woman over a book?'

'The work concerns the deaths of kings,' I said, pus.h.i.+ng on. 'Of English kings.'

He blinked. Yes, tears. One of them escaped, tracking down his left cheek.

'By statute of Parliament it's treasonous to compa.s.s or even imagine the death of the king,' I went on. 'Yet this work and I've heard parts of it, with my own ears, from Braybrooke's friars this work prophesies the deaths of England's last twelve sovereigns, as well as-'

'Ha!' He gave a short, frantic bark of a laugh. 'How is it that a work can prophesy deaths that have already occurred?'

'I asked Braybrooke the same question. According to the bishop, it was written many years ago.'

'Yet again, how-'

'Its prophecies reflect the chronicles accurately. Consider the prophecy on the death of the second Edward.' I repeated the memorable lines I had heard from Braybrooke's friar.

'In Gloucester will he goeth, to be gutted by goodmen With rod straight of iron, in a.r.s.ebone to run.

With pallet of pullet, his breath out to press, And sovereign unsound for Sodom be sundered.'

As I spoke the lines Chaucer stood and walked to the opened door, where he leaned on the sill, his shoulders rising and falling to the shouts on the embankment, the clap of boards from an unloading barge.

I gazed at his back. 'I haven't told you the worst. The thirteenth prophecy foretells the death of King Richard.'

A dismissive cluck. 'No no no, that's wrong, Richard does not-' He froze, his eyes widening as he turned to me. His face paled, going the colour of sunbleached bone. I approached him and took his hand, the earlier cruelty forgotten for the moment. 'Geoffrey, what is it?'

'It cannot be,' he said, his voice just above a whisper, the tears giving way to something I took then as fear. 'This explains but it simply cannot be.'

'You are making no sense, Geoffrey.'

'But of course. Of course!' Tears streamed down his face, his entire frame shaking with the strangest abandon.

Baffling. 'Why are you laughing? These are grave matters.' And what are you not telling me?

Chaucer calmed himself, placing a hand on my shoulder as he wiped the other across his eyes. 'The book, John,' he said. 'Get me the book, and all shall be well.'

'This is blind idiocy, Geoffrey. The Bishop of London himself says it: this is a burnable book, a work of high treason certain to destroy any man who holds it.'

'Get me the book. At any cost.'

'You're acting like a little boy now. Do you want to see your reputation ruined over all this?'

'Reputation,' he said, as if the word were a rotten river oyster. 'My reputation, you say?' Suddenly back from wherever he had been, Chaucer leaned into me, his face a red mask of cruel intention, his neck a foreign bulge of tendons and veins. 'You will find this book for me, O Moral Gower. I know it, and you know it. In a city where everyone owes John Gower, Esquire, a favour, Geoffrey Chaucer may be the only soul to whom he owes one himself. Quite a large one, too. And in a city in which John Gower, Esquire, has information on nearly every man of importance, it may be useful to call to mind the small matter of your son's count-'

'Enough.' I stepped away. 'How dare you threaten me like this?'

He grabbed a pile of c.o.c.kets from his desk and threw them in the air. The parchments snowed around our heads. His lips curled into a puerile sneer. 'Call it a threat if you like. Whatever the case, your position is exceedingly weak. Do not test me, Gower.'

I stared at him, waiting for him to retract the malicious threat behind his words, but his lips seemed frozen in place. 'You've finally stripped the veil, my friend,' I said, a trembling whisper. 'Now you are no better than I am. At last you know what it's like, to have a man's soul in your hands.'

The look Chaucer gave me then was the coldest I had ever seen. 'Poets don't traffic in souls. That is the work of priests. The sooner you learn the difference the better a poet you shall be.' On that cruellest of notes he turned away. 'Find the book. Find it, bring it to me, and just maybe you will see your son in England again.'

As I left the customhouse and paced back along the wharf.a.ge, I carried Chaucer's words as a profound weight on my spirit. Yet from our abrasive encounter one deeper question lingered, a question that concerned neither the viability of this deep friends.h.i.+p nor its tenuous basis in our poetry. The question concerned, rather, the young woman on the Moorfields, this alleged French agent murdered over the very book my difficult friend sought with such singular focus and to whose death he had reacted with such exaggerated surprise that it seemed feigned. It was a question about Geoffrey Chaucer himself, and it had been haunting me for a week and more. A question no longer avoidable.

Could Chaucer kill?